US Commerce signs $874 million in CHIPS Act awards, taking equity in seven chip firms

The US Department of Commerce signed letters of intent for $874 million in CHIPS and Science Act research awards to seven AI-supply-chain companies on July 29, 2026, with GlobalFoundries winning the largest share.

The awards come with a condition that breaks from past CHIPS grants: the US government takes a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each recipient — about 1% in GlobalFoundries. Commerce said the announced figures are maximums, still subject to further review and formal approval rather than final grants.

GlobalFoundries stands to receive up to $300 million to speed development of co-packaged and near-packaged optics through its SCALE silicon-photonics platform, which it said targets 400 Gb/s performance and roughly five times better energy efficiency. The remaining six awards range from $30 million to $245 million: Kepler for 3D ferroelectric AI memory, Multibeam for advanced packaging, Extropic for thermodynamic sampling units, Thintronics for interconnect dielectrics, OBSIDIA for counterfeit-component detection, and Aeluma for substrate technology.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the investments are ‘accelerating America’s innovation engine’ and will ‘create high-paying jobs.’ GlobalFoundries CEO Tim Breen called silicon photonics ‘essential to AI infrastructure,’ and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang echoed that it is essential to AI’s future — a nod to the technology’s role in moving data between chips as AI clusters scale.

Because the awards are letters of intent, not finalized contracts, the dollar figures could shrink during government review, and none of the equity terms beyond the GlobalFoundries stake have been detailed. How the government exercises minority ownership in private chip firms, a rare arrangement, has not been spelled out.